C.S. Lewis: Risk &Love

To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung
and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping your heart intact,
You must give it to no one, not even an animal.
Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements; lock it up in a casket safe,
dark, motionless, airless, but there it will change.
It will not become broken but unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe
From all the dangers of love is hell.